This is how you feel when your day is blown up under a microscope…when the details of every minute are registered in your head… when you measure the ‘happy’ quotient of the day with the triumphs you might not even notice otherwise… when you believe you are free…
Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d many strokes of luck that day : they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw-blade through; he’d earned something from Taezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. he’d got over it.
A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is a book describing one of the ‘happy’ days in the life of a prisoner in Stalin’s Soviet.
The author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was imprisoned for eight and exiled for another twenty years, charged with making derogatory remarks on Stalin. This book elaborates the life in one of the forced labor camps also known as ‘Gulag’ camps more commonly, where the author was made to stay. First of its kind, the story could only be released after Stalin’s death, with later on earning the Nobel prize for literature for its author.
Very well written, this book will make you feel happy/sad/painful in the protagonist’s journey thru the day. Detailed account of thoughts, fears and anxiety, one bears at a place where anything and everything is legal and you are only a head count to be kept alive to serve; will make you rethink hope of any kind…
He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not. To begin with, he’d wanted it very much, and counted up every evening how many days he still had to serve. Then he’d got fed up with it. And still later it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier—here or there.
Disha 